Web analysis

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print or broadcast advertising campaigns.

irrespective of the type of website you have, a storefront, an informational or a little-bit-of-both type, web analytics is crucial in determining whether you are achieving your goals or not. Web analytics can also guide you towards your future development and ensure a constant success in all your web strategies.

Although internet marketing is much more than just emails, to track the progress of your email marketing strategy, a number of helpful metrics can be provided by your email service provider.

What is web analytics?

The fact that customers have the option of taking numerous other paths to reach your website, paths like search engine results, pop up ads, ads in the forms of banners, links that are found on social media sites, etc., makes it crucial for you to track every bit of your customer’s behaviour to understand what works for you and what doesn’t.

You need a tool that lets you track where your web traffic is coming from. What are the kinds of blog posts, the topics, the pages that are diverting the maximum amount of traffic to your website? You also need to know what is the best day and time when traffic is typically the maximum on your website. What are the typical keywords that people type into search engines that drive them to your website? Web analytics tools lets you keep a track on all of this and also how the leads are converting to actual buyers.

This information is vital in helping you marketing strategies be a success. The data gathered by web analytics can help you identify and choose the best strategy that works for you, the best day and they best time to leverage maximum success out of your marketing strategies.

Web analytics can also help you generate new leads and target new markets that might not have occurred to you otherwise.

Ignoring web analytics is like throwing away your opportunities to improve and develop the true potential of your website and also to let go of your chance to expand, focus and develop your business to best meet your target market.

There are equally vast numbers of web analytics providers that you can choose from to help you achieve this goal. So far, Google analytics is the largest provider of web analytics out there which offers a vast number of services yet is absolutely free. You can choose from the vast number of providers apart from Google, that you can buy for a basic annual subscription too. Irrespective of the provider you choose for yourself, you need to have the basic idea of the types of information that are available for you.

On-site analytics

The way your customers behave while they are on your website is referred to as On-site analytics. On-site analytics lets you track how are the users navigating your website, which are the pages that are visited more often than others, are there too many exits after a particular page? How long do visitors stay on your site, how many of these footfalls result into actual conversions or purchases?

The ability to focus on every customer individually is one of the most convenient and useful features offered by web analytics. For example, you can track users behaviours and compare the data between the users who actually ended up making a successful purchase as opposed to the ones who didn’t. It can also help you track the difference in behaviours between the users who make substantial purchases versus the ones who make small ones.

It must be remembered at all times that your ultimate goal is to make successful sales and conversions and not merely increasing web traffic. On-site analytics therefore helps you track what is working for your website and what is not, to determine what is actually the feature/s that is actually driving in revenue and what aren’t.

Off-Site analytics

To understand what your customers are doing while they are on your website, you first need to drive them to your website. You need to use different forms of online advertising, email campaigns, and lot more to lure your audience to your website. Off-site analytics tools will help you track your progress and understand which efforts worked the best for you and which ones didn’t.

Understanding the source of your website traffic is vital. The main purpose of web analytics is to find out how much of your traffic is coming from where – for example, whether they are coming via search engine hit, your banner ads, bookmarks, etc.

A good analytic tool will provide you with a detailed report of which term lead to the maximum number of footfalls to your website when searched, which advertisement drove the maximum amount of visitors to your website and which social media was responsible for leading the maximum number of clicks on your banner ad.

The more organized and efficient your web analytic tool is, the more accurately and quickly it tracks the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Even the most basic tools provide you with information that is almost in real time.

The most vital part of your marketing strategy are online marketing and mobile marketing. It’s a long established fact that good web analytics can help your marketing strategies in the age where new media channels are evolving rapidly and are fast becoming the need of the hour. Choosing just the right tool that matches your business needs will pay you back in fat money.

What is the most important Data?

Depending on your business type, and the goal you are aiming to achieve, the following data should be looked out for,

Page Views

Amount of time spent on your site

Downloads

Click path

Click map

Referral websites

Referral search engines

Direct visits

Offline campaigns and dedicated URLs

Tracked links and online campaigns

Keywords

Visitor’s geography

New visitors

Returning visitors

Conversions and successful sales

Number of exits

A/B testing to see which page converts better

3 key things Web analytics helps you do

Measure

Web analytics makes it easier and possible for you to measure success the way you would measure a projects that has a target of set goals.

The amount of footfall is the key and the more traffic you can drive to your website the closer you are to achieving your desired goals.

It allows you to measure the success of your online campaigns and the number of footfall falling on your website because of this which ultimately helps you decide which would be the best strategies to adopt for achieving success.

Adapt

Once you learn to measure successfully the failures and successes of your website, and have set your goals, you will be able to identify the best ways to improve your website to help you on the path of successfully achieving those goals.

The data provided by your analytics can be used to adapt to the latest technologies by observing the latest trends and gadgets that your visitors are visiting from. It helps you to figure out the best device to target your marketing strategies on by helping you gather information on which devices are you getting maximum traffic through. This will in-turn let you optimize your website according to that device.

Develop

Your online strategy can have certain bits of analytical data built into them which will allow you to develop and effective marketing strategy.

The most important of these should be your site’s referrals that are driving traffic to your website. This will help you to assess where your visitors are coming from apart from the SEO you have, and allows you to understand the impact it has on your website.

Once you have this information you can optimize your website by building stronger links, better posts, stronger rapport with external partners and everything else that is affecting the footfall to your website in the most positive way.

It can also help you figure out the pages and content that proved to be the most popular so that you can develop a stronger digital strategy with these pages and contents.

Web analytics can also tell you which regions give you the maximum number of visitors which in-turn opens up new platforms for you to generate new leads and possibilities for your business. If you could tailor your strategies according to the regional needs of the area, you are looking at a possible market for yourself.

Web analytics deliver data about your website, your visitors and their behaviour, so you can measure what’s working and what isn’t, and improve your website’s performance and conversion rates.

Why is Web Analytics Important?

Using web analytics, you can track where your web traffic is coming from, what kinds of blog posts, topics and pages attract the most traffic, what day of the week is the busiest in terms of traffic, and what kinds of keywords people are typing into search engines to arrive at your website. You can also track where and how your traffic converts to sales leads, and where those leads come from.

This kind of information is invaluable in helping you to maximise your online marketing and sales generation leads, and improving your user experience. Using web analytics to track the kinds of data mentioned, you can identify the best days to publish blog posts and the topics that are of the most interest to your readers. You can determine which kinds of content will best serve the needs of your online audience, and make informed decisions on the types of eBooks, online courses, podcasts or additional informational products to offer. You can pinpoint how best to spend your online marketing budget, which keywords to target for Google Adwords, and which phrases to focus on for your ongoing search engine optimisation efforts. You can decide whether dedicating time to social media marketing is working for you, and whether you should continue engagement across multiple platforms or focus your attention on just one network. And you can identify additional opportunities for more traffic and leads – even in target markets that might have ordinarily occurred to you.

If you don’t analyse the current state of your website data, visitors, traffic and conversions, how will you know what areas need to be further developed or improved? Ignoring web analytics is throwing away opportunities to improve not only the functionality of your website, but also to expand, focus or develop your product offerings to best meet the needs or your target market.

A Roadmap to Success

Imagine you need to drive to a marketplace you’ve never visited before to sell your products. You look up the directions and head out on the road, convinced that this market is going to generate a lot of interest in your business or products. You think the trip will take around 45 minutes… but after an hour of driving you still haven’t reached your destination. Do you give up, frustrated, and turn the car around to drive home? Or do you take a minute to pull over and check a map to make sure you’re on the right road, adjust course if you need to, and then continue on your way?

Obviously you wouldn’t drive an hour just to turn around and drive all the way home without having sold one product. And using your website to sell your business and products to customers online is very similar. Sometimes you might feel like you’re not getting to where you want to be in terms of sales fast enough – but that doesn’t mean you should throw your hands in the air and shut shop on your online storefront. It also doesn’t mean crossing your fingers, hoping for the best and continuing on without checking your map, though. And in the case of your business website, your map is your web analytics.

If you really want your website to work to your advantage, to gain a good flow of traffic and to turn your visitors into sales, you need to check in with your map regularly to ensure you’re on the right track and helping your website to be the best it can be.